12 October 2025
Download: Missing Men – Quarterly Report Series 2025 (Male Employment)
The Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys is recommending a “This Boy Cares,” campaign to encourage males to take up roles in areas including teaching and health and social care, where male involvement is desperately lacking and needed. The policy suggestion comes off the back of the second Missing Men – Men and Boys’ Scorecard, released today. It shows serious continuing regional variations, identifying that if male employment rates in the three most struggling regions could be raised to those of the three best, more than 150,000 men could be helped back to work.
The CPRMB is suggesting concentrating efforts in the North West, Wales and the North East could have a crucial impact in reaching the government’s target of an 80% employment rate, particularly in areas of career advice and campaigns aimed at encouraging greater male participation in jobs where they are becoming vanishingly rare.
Mark Brooks, Director of Policy and Communications says, “Teaching is an obvious example; fewer than one in four teachers are men. We know there is a need for more male role models. We know there is a need for greater employment opportunities for men. It’s logical, therefore, to work at encouraging them into teaching. ”
Talking about the fact that men are struggling for work to a far greater degree in some regions than others, Mark says, “We need to look more closely at those areas where there is the greatest available resource of people not working and therefore the greatest opportunity for improvement. We know the government is already targeting eight trailblazer regions integrating health and employment support through the Get Britain Working strategy and there is some welcome overlap with these. What we’re saying is that some of this strategy would benefit from a gender lens to understand the specific barriers to economic activity being faced by men.”
Responding to the evidence illustrated in the scorecard, the CPRMB is also calling for the forthcoming schools’ white paper to take a gender-sensitive approach to properly address boys’ relative education struggles. Mark says, “ There used to be a far higher proportion of men teaching in schools and there remains gender employment gaps in care homes and nursing in hospitals. We need to get teenage boys and young men thinking about these careers when they are starting to think about work. “‘This Boy Cares” would be a perfect campaign name. We need to understand the reasons what the barriers are for men and address them, or male economic activity is not going to be improved and the government will not achieve the growth it desires.”
The Missing Men and Boys’ Scorecard is the second publication from the CPRMB. Every quarter it aims to collate available data over a wide range of areas affecting British males. This quarter is focusing on employment, but future instalments will also look at economy, skills, education, health (suicide, mental and physical), criminal justice, fatherhood and family, male identity and portrayal of men in media and culture. Mark says, “We will always make clear when issuing the Men and Boys’ Scorecard that fundamental to ethos and purpose of the CRMB is that doing more for boys and men does not mean doing less for girls and women. It is not a zero-sum game. Any policies we advocate are designed to benefit the population as a whole by addressing the problems addressed by the male half.”
ENDS
1 For further information, please contact Simon Garrett – simon@virtubrands.com – 07974 566043
Press Release Number: PR02/25